Best U.S. backpacking trips

A backpacker in The Narrows in Zion National Park.

The 5 Southwest Backpacking Trips You Should Do First

By Michael Lanza

You want to explore the best backpacking in America’s desert Southwest, but you’re not sure where to begin, or how some of these trips you’ve read about compare for scenery and difficulty. You’ve heard about the need to carry huge loads of water, and environmental challenges like dangerous heat, rugged terrain, flash floods and even (gulp) quicksand. Or maybe you’ve taken one or two backpacking trips there and now you’re hungry for another one and seeking ideas for where to go next.

Well, I gotcha covered. The five trips described in this story comprise what might be called a Southwest Backpacking Starter Package. They are all beginner- and family-friendly in terms of trail or route quality, access, and navigability, and some have good water availability. But most importantly, regardless of their relative ease logistically, they all deliver the goods on the kind of adventure and scenery you go to the Southwest hoping to find.

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Backpackers on the Wonderland Trail west of Sunrise in Mount Rainier National Park.

How to Get a Permit to Backpack Rainier’s Wonderland Trail

By Michael Lanza

Any backpacker making the substantial effort to hike the 93-mile Wonderland Trail around Washington’s Mount Rainier soon discovers why it’s one of the most popular backpacking trips in the country. Those reasons include regularly wading through some of the best wildflower meadows you’ll see anywhere, the numerous waterfalls and raging rivers gray with glacial flour—and the countless times that the most heavily glaciated peak in the Lower 48, 14,410-foot Mount Rainier, suddenly pops into view, looking impossibly massive.

That’s also why few backcountry permits are harder to get than one for the Wonderland—unquestionably one of “America’s Top 10 Best Backpacking Trips” and “The 10 Best National Park Backpacking Trips.”

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A backpacker on the Continental Divide Trail above Medicine Grizzly Lake in Glacier National Park.

How to Get a Permit to Backpack in Glacier National Park

By Michael Lanza

There are two immutable truths about backpacking in Glacier National Park. First, from its stirring landscape, where glaciers hang off muscular mountains and sheer cliffs soar above deeply green valleys dappled with lakes and waterfalls, to almost certain sightings of wildlife like mountain goats, bighorn sheep, moose, elk, and grizzly and black bears, there’s really no place in the continental United States quite like Glacier.

Second, it’s one of the hardest backcountry permits to get in the National Park System. But Glacier adopted a new wilderness permit reservation system in 2023 that improved on what preceded it and made changes again to the system for 2024 that greatly improve it, bringing equity to the process and eliminating the frantic scramble for a permit that the 2023 changes had spawned

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A backpacker at Park Creek Pass, North Cascades National Park.

10 Outdoor Adventures to Put on Your Bucket List Now

By Michael Lanza

Are you looking for great trip ideas for your bucket list? Well, you’ve clicked to the right place. This freshly updated story spotlights seven of the best wildlands in the U.S., including Glacier, Yosemite, North Cascades (photo above), and Sequoia national parks and three wilderness areas, plus three international adventures that may not be on your radar—all of them worthy of your bucket list.

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A backpacker hiking over Clouds Rest in Yosemite National Park.

10 Perfect National Park Backpacking Trips for Beginners

By Michael Lanza

So you’re a novice backpacker, or you’re planning your first backpacking trip in a big, Western national park, or you have kids you want to take on a relatively easy backpacking trip—and you want to sample the best scenery, trails, and backcountry campsites that experienced backpackers get to enjoy in our national parks. No worries. These 10 trips in Grand Teton, Zion, Grand Canyon, Glacier, Olympic, Rocky Mountain, Mount Rainier, Canyonlands, and two in Yosemite (photo above) are ideal for beginners and families, with easy to moderately difficult days and simple logistics, while delivering the spectacular vistas that each of these parks is famous for.

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